Efficient Peak Temperature Computation with Leakage Power Consideration

With the modern multi-core technology to explore more computing power in a chip, overheating is now a critical problem of chip designs for smart phones, personal computers, and high-end servers. Therefore, various power management algorithms are developed to meet the computing requirements without violating the thermal constraints, and all of the power management algorithms rely on not only the measurement of the current temperature but also the temperature estimation for the following time points. However, most of the existing temperature estimation algorithms assume that the leakage power consumption of a chip is a constant and are not aware of the impact of temperature on the leakage power consumption which is more and more significant in the advanced multi-core chips. This paper explores the feedback loop between the temperature and the leakage power consumption of a circuit and develops a temperature-aware power model to provide the accurate temperature estimation for multi-core platforms. The performance of the proposed estimation scheme is then evaluated with benchmark suites in terms of the estimation error and the computing time. The experimental results show that our scheme is more accurate than all of the competing solutions, and the short computing time also makes our scheme suitable for real-time power management algorithms.